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Europe is in huge trouble

A new report warns that Europe is vulnerable later this century to extreme weather events that could kill tens of thousands of people.

An alarming new report indicates that Europe could be in major trouble, with weather disasters increasing 50-fold by the start of the next century on the continent if no action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The resulting global warming would kill 152,000 people in Europe between 2071 and 2100, the study found.

The study, published in Lancet Planetary Health, are “alarming,” said study co-author Giovanni Forzieri from the European Commission Joint Research Centre in Italy. Forzieri and colleagues describe their predictions in the journal, and how seven types of weather events are likely to increase in the coming years in Europe if nothing is done about global warming.

The analysis is based on large datasets from disasters in reent years to detemrine just how vulnerable humans are to various weather events. THey examined the impact to Europeans over 30-year intervals and found that weather-related disasters could be an annual event in Europe in the 2071-2100 period.

“The world population faces various types of climate-related hazards, and both the frequency and intensity of hazards are projected to increase in the future because of climate change,” the abstract states. “Since climate change could increase human health risks, many previous studies first estimated future temperatures or weather-related extreme events on the basis of global circulation models under climate scenarios, such as representative concentration pathways. Then, they projected the elevated future mortality caused by climate change on the basis of the relationship between temperature and mortality obtained from historical data. Additionally, population changes and adaptation scenarios were also considered to accurately address future health risks. Mortality changes linearly with total population.”